Vitagraph’s Manchester office in 1921, from Richard Brown’s article ‘The Missing Link: Film Renters in Manchester, 1910–1920’

OK, not that film studies, but Film Studies the journal, published by Manchester University Press, produced out of the University of Kent, which is no more. This is sad news, because it was handsomely produced and filled with stimulating riches, issue after issue. But, as Catherine Grant on the never less than essential Film Studies for Free reports, Manchester University Press has done the decent thing and made all of the articles in the journal 2004-2007 freely available online in PDF format (earlier content 1999-2004 isn’t available in digital form). Film Studies for Free lists all of the articles that are available; here at the Bioscope we’re selective in our tastes, so here is all the articles which touch on silent cinema:

Volume 10 (Spring 2007)
Luke McKernan, ‘Only the screen was silent …’: Memories of children’s cinema-going in London before the First World War
(pp 1-20)
Full Article in PDF p1 (273 k)

Simon Brown, Flicker Alley: Cecil Court and the Emergence of the British Film Industry
(pp 21-33)
Full Article in PDF p21 (122 k)

Janet McBain, Green’s of Glasgow: `We Want "U" In’
(pp 54-57)
Full Article in PDF p54 (124 k)

Richard Brown, The Missing Link: Renters in Manchester, 1910-1920
(pp 58-63)
Full Article in PDF p58 (157 k)

Frank Gray, Kissing and Killing: A Short History of Brighton on Film
(pp 64-71)
Full Article in PDF p64 (113 k)

Brigitte Flickinger, Cinemas in the City: Berlin’s Public Space in the 1910s and 1920s
(pp 72-86)
Full Article in PDF p72 (173 k)

Kate Bowles, ‘All the evidence is that Cobargo is slipping’: An ecological approach to rural cinema-going
(pp 87-96)
Full Article in PDF p87 (120 k)

Volume 9 (Winter 2006)
David Lavery, ‘No More Undiscovered Countries’: The Early Promise and Disappointing Career of Time-Lapse
Photography
(pp 1-8)
Full Article in PDF p1 (92 k)

Volume 8 (Summer 2006)

Patrick Colm Hogan, Narrative Universals, Nationalism, and Sacrificial Terror: From Nosferatu to Nazism
(pp 93-105)
Full Article in PDF p93 (208 k)

Volume 6 (Summer 2005)

David Trotter, Virginia Woolf and Cinema
(pp 13-26)
Full Article in PDF p13 (152 k)

Elizabeth Lebas, Sadness and Gladness: The Films of Glasgow Corporation, 1922-1938
(pp 27-45)
Full Article in PDF p27 (236 k)

Volume 4 (Summer 2004)

Charles Musser, The Hidden and the Unspeakable: On Theatrical Culture, Oscar Wilde and Ernst Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan
(pp 12-47)
Full Article in PDF p12 (478 k) [this PDF is not working at present]

A marvellous selection, including a number from a special issue on Cities and Cinema. I can quite recommend the top article to you – and all the others just as much. For the remaining articles, do visit the relevant MUP web page. If a journal does have to fold, this is a noble way of keeping its contents available, especially for those without easy access to academic libraries, so plaudits to MUP, and hopefully it’s a model that others will follow (though of course we’d rather not have any more film journals fold, of course).